Book Review: Just Kids

I read Just Kids a while ago, but I thought about it again this week with the news that Urban Outfitters has issued -- and now removed -- a graphic tee shirt sporting a print of one of Robert Mapplethorpe's self-portraits. Just Kids is the singer/writer/artist Patti Smith's remembrance of her youth in New York with Mapplethorpe, particularly the time they spent in the Chelsea Hotel as they both refined their creative impulses and etched out careers in the arts, she (most famously) as the leader of a rock band and he as a photographer who pushed the boundaries of depicting sexuality in a visual medium. As the title suggests, the book is mainly about Smith and Mapplethorpe when they were kids, from the time they met in the late sixties until they went their separate ways in the late seventies, with little said about the years leading up to Mapplethorpe's death in 1989, and through her writing, Smith perfectly captures the spirit of youth as well as the spirit of New York City in the middle of the twentieth century. When she shares anecdotes about cultural icons like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol, her simple, nostalgic style brings them down to a human level and never feels like name-dropping; perhaps this is because while she accompanied Mapplethorpe during some of his forays into the world of New York's artistic elite, she always maintained the perspective of an outsider and a unique personality, ultimately finding her place in the small punk rock club CBGB rather than lounging around Warhol's Factory.

Just Kids is, at its heart, a love story and an ode to two people who were destined to be together, even as the way they related to each other constantly changed -- first as lovers, then as friends; first as struggling artists, then as champions of the artistic paths each chose to pursue. Their relationship was full of contradictions, just as Mapplethorpe himself was a bit of a paradox: he was more hedonistic and inclined to the drug culture than Smith, but he was also more focused on turning his art into a career and scolded Smith when he felt she was letting her talent go to waste. He struggled to reconcile his free spirit with his strict Catholic upbringing, just as he struggled to reconcile his homosexuality with the love he felt for Smith, and it is his struggle -- as well as Smith's -- that makes their love story both universal and ultimately poignant. The moment when they meet again in the late eighties, as Smith is preparing to give birth to her second child and Mapplethorpe is gradually succumbing to AIDS, is a beautiful and sad coda to the story of their youth.

photo via here

What is interesting about Urban Outfitters using Mapplethorpe's photograph to sell tee shirts is not that the consumerism at the heart of putting any artist's work on a piece of clothing would necessarily bother Mapplethorpe -- as I said, he had a businessman's approach to photography as well as an artist's approach -- but the way art can easily end up serving a purpose contrary to the wishes of the artist, not to mention (some of) the art's consumers. As this article points out, Urban Outfitters caters to young, city-dwelling twenty-somethings with a penchant for the vintage and the ironic -- hipsters, in other words -- a group that is primarily associated with liberal attitudes and the support of human rights, yet Urban Outfitters' CEO is a stanch conservative who has donated large sums of money to politicians like Rick Santorum, which means that a photograph by a man who made a name for himself by blending elements of pornography with photography is now being used to clothe people who have the kind of money Mapplethorpe never had when he was hustling to pay his and Smith's rent, as well as putting money into the pocket of a politician who seems hell-bent on oppressing the gay population Mapplethorpe strove to represent and who recently said he wants to make pornography itself illegal. Now that is ironic.

Either way, the shirt is no longer available, either because it was pulled from the shelves (for one reason or another) or because it simply sold out, which, considering the scenario outlined above, might actually be the worse option. Yet it's naive to think this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time, because art doesn't -- nor should it -- exist in a vacuum; it is just as easy for someone to misappropriate and misinterpret art as it is for them to honor and champion it. We might cringe when a politician like Ronald Reagan tries to turn Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" into a patriotic anthem, but how many people today realize that "Born in the USA" isn't a patriotic anthem, that it's actually a protest song about the aftermath of the Vietnam War? I wonder how many people go into reading Just Kids knowing who Robert Mapplethorpe was, or that he was gay? But that's the beauty of universal art at the same time that it's the downside: no matter how art reaches us, it's still reaching us, and there's always the chance that it will change us, too. That fact alone might be worth the risk.